By Bonita Robinson

It started with a text from my nephew. A simple question that took me days to answer:

 

“Did you, Grandma, my mom, feel like y’all made it out when you left the apartment complex?”

 

That question became an ultimate unboxing. I never thought of it that way. We just… left. We moved. We kept going. But the more I reflected, the more I realized:

 

I didn’t know I was “in something” until I had something to compare my life to.

 

The first comparison came through the church. While salvation is a gift, wisdom and knowledge don’t automatically come with it.

 

Then came marriage. I thought I had entered royalty with the Forbes name, a priesthood, and a legacy. But even that understanding was limited.

 

The real shift came during my liberal arts education. One white female professor, Dr. Johnson, changed the trajectory of my thinking with one question:

 

“What do you read?”

 

I told her Harlequin Romances.

 

Without missing a beat, she replied, “Stop reading that garbage.” I was taken aback. “You don’t like romance novels?”

 

She said, “I do. But have you ever read Their Eyes Were Watching God or The Color Purple?”

 

I told her I didn’t read books about Black women. That they always struggled, always disappointed. I was twenty-five years old, married with three babies. I didn’t want to see myself in that way.

 

And before I could embarrass myself further, she said, “Black women are the strength of the world. They are resilient. They have overcome barriers most can’t imagine. Black women are my heroes. You don’t know who you are yet, or the power you’ve inherited.”

 

She said those words to me, and I didn’t get mad or offended. I felt her pull to help me discover a consciousness that was missing, which she must have seen in my speech, writing, and struggle to find my authentic voice.

 

She gave me a stack of books by women who looked like me and told me to read them.

 

So I did. Hurston. Walker. Angelou. Morrison.

 

I fell in love with their voices. I heard my mama in them. I saw my grandmother’s quiet strength in them. I began understanding the world, my people, and myself through literature that school never taught me. It shaped my thinking, how I saw my husband, and how I raised my children. It was then that I realized I had been “in something” my whole life—and now I was finally seeing it for the first time, truly understanding the root of our trauma and how the idea of survival is the blueprint handed down from one generation to the next. And some of us miss it because getting out is not about a physical place; it’s how we think.

 

Dr. Johnson gave me a pearl that I was ready to receive. Thank God that she saw something in me that I didn’t see in myself. No one else had seen it, and if they did, they didn’t see fit to tell me.

 

That brings me to now. Last week, a white woman boarded a school bus in my town and berated a middle school-aged Black girl, calling her a f——————- N-word. It made the news. The video went viral. She was charged and arrested.

 

The response from some in the community? “What happened to make her act that way? What’s the rest of the story?”

 

Let me be clear: It doesn’t matter.

 

No story justifies what she said. No amount of frustration makes racial slurs acceptable, especially not against children.

 

I’ve lived in this community for 36 years, taught in these schools, and raised my children here. My husband and I have served this community. And yet, here we are. Still asking Black children to be strong enough to survive the kind of hate that grown adults refuse to hold accountable.

 

This woman’s social media is full of racist rhetoric. This wasn’t a one-time slip. It was a buildup—a worldview. And what grieves me most is that parts of the community still offer her cover. Still entertaining excuses.

 

When are Black children going to be allowed to just be children? When will their humanity be protected without conditions or questions?

 

We love to talk about Black resilience. But I’m tired of resilience being a requirement for basic dignity.

 

Strength is beautiful. But it shouldn’t be the cost of our survival.

 

So yes, nephew. We made it out. But not in the way we thought we did.

 

We made it out of the silence, out of the shame. We were out of the limited scope of who we were supposed to be.

 

And now that we know, we speak. We name it. We demand more.

 

We are still making it out—I’ll keep writing about it; I’ll keep sounding the alarm that something is way out of kilter when we consider condoning any kind of an attack on a child.

 

If you’re watching from the sidelines, waiting for more details before condemning hate, ask yourself: Why? What stories are you still believing about who deserves protection, and who must earn it through suffering? What parts of you are still looking for reasons not to disrupt the status quo? Because the rest of us are tired. Tired of having to prove our pain. Tired of explaining the obvious. Tired of being asked to be strong when we should be allowed to just be.